Explore "Absinthe at the Cheshire Cheese" by Joyce Kilmer on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Belonging rather to gossip than to literary history, the following anecdote is nevertheless significant when considered merely as an illustrative legend. A certain London publisher, it is said, recently had in his possession a notebook that had been found, after his death, among the effects of Lionel Johnson. The poet had scribbled in it memoranda of all sorts: notes for essays, stray epigrams, rough drafts of poems. He had also copied into it, from books and magazines, bits of prose and verse that gave him pleasure. Well, one day this friend said to Johnson's loyal friend, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney -- and, by the way, Miss Guiney is not my authority for this story -- "Do you know, I have found in this notebook an unpublished poem by Lionel Johnson! It is very beautiful, far better than any of Johnson's published poems. I'll read it to you. " Thereupon he opened the notebook and began to declaim:
Last night, ah, yesternight, between her lips and mine / There fell thy shadow, Cynara!